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When we have supped full of horrors

By Alisa Craddock
web posted July 28, 2007

The spectre most often cited by howling pro-abortion forces when anything threatens their sacred cow is that of the "horrors of the back alley abortion".  Butchered wombs, rusty coat hangers, women bleeding to death because an unsympathetic world insisted that they be "punished with a baby" for their indiscretion (or rape or incest victimization)—a baby which, the pro-aborts remind us who march tirelessly against them, we are not going to be saddled with, nor would we consent to be.  It is thrown down like a gauntlet.  "Are you going to be responsible for caring for this child?"  It is, of course, a distraction from the real evil of infanticide.  It is, after all, the parents' job to care for their child. 

The almost always promiscuous behavior that led to it is, to liberals, an unrelated issue.  It would never occur to these "compassionate" progressives that the liberal social policies they cherish and promote and the resultant irresponsible behavior they insist is a right are actually creating the conditions that compel the "necessity" of abortion.  At least they would never admit that they do.  

There are plenty of children born poor in this country, and their mothers love them and take care of them as best they can.  It is a hard life, single motherhood:  Mothers often work long hours at menial jobs, and children are frequently left unattended.  Most will get into trouble.  If many mothers regret that they weren't more careful, they certainly don't regret their children, only that they weren't better prepared to welcome and care for them.   And I don't see many of them giving their "unwanted" children up for adoption.  But it is the "evil" of the unwanted child (and let's face it, most young ladies who breathlessly part their thighs are not doing so because they want a baby) that so distresses the advocates of abortion.  Perhaps it is to them, the liberal elite, with their secret hatred of the children of "dysgenic stock" to use Margaret Sanger's words, that the children are really "unwanted".  Abortion advocacy parades around as women's rights, but it is really about eugenics.  It always has been.  The eugenics movement of the 20th Century, and that wolf in sheep's clothing, women's reproductive health services (abortion), that pretends it is a "women's right" promoted today in the policies of Planned Parenthood, the UNFPA, IPPF, UNICEF, and other population control organizations, are two faces of the same disease.  Abortion is the product of liberals and progressives, and it's the same old elitist mentality of the early American eugenics movement.

The seemingly defensible act (at least in many minds, including mine at one time) of allowing a young, unmarried woman to get an abortion rather than be faced with the unpleasant prospect of having her whole life and dreams rearranged by one mistake (the compassionate view) has been gradually overwhelmed by a rabidly anti-life culture.  Such an attitude is the inevitable and necessary outcome to ensure the success of "undesirable populations" control.  One might conclude that all the social chaos has been engineered precisely to ensure acquiescence on the part of a weary public.

It is now well-known (though it never seems to come up when it would be most useful) that the horrendous abortion statistics that NARAL used to advocate for abortion (1,000,000 illegal abortions annually, with 10,000 resulting in death) were complete fabrications, as reported by Dr. Bernard Nathanson, the fabricator of those statistics (Dr. Nathanson is a former abortionist, now a pro-life activist).  Abortion is now so interwoven into our culture that the lies used to foist it on the culture have become immaterial.  For the record, though, there were in fact 39 deaths from illegal abortions in 1972, the year before Roe v Wade.

So this is the spectre that so haunts the pro-abortionists.  The loss of one life to abortion (legal or otherwise) is tragic indeed, but the imagined (or feigned) horrors or the illegal abortion are far outweighed by the horrors of having legalized abortion.  And the longer the anti-life disease is allowed to fester, the more hideous becomes the face of mankind.

There are the social consequences:  It may seem bizarre, but unwed pregnancy actually skyrocketed after the introduction of contraception and abortion because of the promiscuity they made possible.  And the consequences are costliest to the children.  The overwhelming majority of children growing up in poverty are in single-parent families.  In addition, the over 70% of men in prison grew up without a father.  A study I read about some years ago (reported by Charles Colson) concerned inner city youth, and compared those who were raised by single mothers who never married with those who came from a stable two-parent family.  It was found that of those who grew up without a father, over 90% got into trouble with the law before reaching adulthood, compared with 6% of children raised in a two-parent home.  Other studies have shown that children without fathers are more likely to abuse drugs, more likely to get pregnant, or more likely to join gangs, among other things.  This pattern crosses all boundaries of race and even economics, though it is obviously much more prevalent among the poor whose prospects are made practically nil by poor education and poor socialization. 

These are what I think of as the "ordinary" consequences of abortion.  The more insidious, and more horrendous, consequence is the subtle destruction of the souls of children raised in an anti-life environment.  It's a formula for a reign of terror on the world stage that will make the Nazi atrocities look like a gradeschool play.  Eventually the façade of compassion and human rights will fall away.  As the years go on, the stories become more sickening, starting with the jubilant feminist who, upon the triumph of the Roe v. Wade decision, got pregnant for the sole purpose of exercising her empowerment" to kill it. 

Many other episodes I have reported in previous columns:  the young women Olympic competitors who practice a diabolical form of blood doping by getting pregnant three months before competing, and aborting two weeks prior so that they can reap the benefits of increased strength and stamina brought on through the chemical changes the pregnancy caused in their bodies. 

There is the use of fetal tissue in the manufacture of youth restoring products, and the manipulation of young women to keep their babies longer before aborting to increase the resale value of the parts. 

There is the infant born alive in Christ Hospital, left on a shelf in a linen closet to die.  From this case came Illinois's version of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, and also the sickeningly legalistic dissent by Barack Obama that "whenever we define a previable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we're really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a – child, a 9-month-old – child that was delivered to term…I mean, it – it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an anti-abortion statute. For that purpose, I think it would probably be found unconstitutional."  (It wasn't…)

Suppose a "fetus" is simply born prematurely, and the parents want it, and every effort is made to save it, at what point does it become a child?  If someone comes in and stabs its little beating heart while it's in the incubator, would you say it isn't murder because, well, it wasn't really a child, because to call it a child, you'd have to call any child born prematurely a child, including those who were not supposed to be born alive, but were, and, well, that would mean that a pre-born infant was a child, and that would mean that killing it in the womb was the same as killing it outside of the womb, and that would be an anti-abortion statute.  But don't you see how grisly and cold you have to be to dehumanize a child that way?   But he did…And they call us conservatives Nazi's.  So what do you call this, "The final solution to the premie question."

Legalese covers a multitude of sins, though.  Euthanasia, for example.  But not the "compassionate" euthanasia practiced on animals.  I mean the withholding of food and water until a person dies of dehydration and starvation.  I guess the public isn't ready for "the needle" to be used on people yet—too much like the death penalty for the crime of being a burden on the healthcare system--not to mention cheating spouses.   So we simply reclassify food and water as "treatment" and withhold "treatment" and pretend they can't feel it anyway.  We wouldn't do that to an animal.

The list is endless: the born-alive infant from a botched abortion put into a bio-bag and placed in the garbage, and later thrown on the roof in blistering heat to hide it from police who were called by a horrified employee to investigate…the myriad instances of violent attacks by hysterical wild-eyed pro-aborts against peaceful pro-life protesters…the forced abortions, and the intimidation used to compel women to go through with it…the dogs that dragged away a bag full of aborted fetuses left for the trash collection.  "There were frequent fights and the contents of the bags would be strewn up and down the streets until the dogs separated the gauze, sponges and pads and devoured the placenta, bones and flesh of the babies," reported one woman, a mother.  (They could at least cremate them like the Nazi's did, if only to be "efficient".  There is something terribly callous about putting the little bodies in the trash.  Let your mind ponder the mentality of the abortionist who rips apart these little bodies and tosses them into the trash to dispose of them like they were leftovers scraps from the dinner table.) 

The grisly stories surrounding abortion and those associated with it—the abortionists, the unfortunate women who have had abortions, the propaganda machine that has dehumanized us to the point that we are heedless of the sacredness of our own and other people's life, so that a callous, even murderous, mindset has stealthily overtaken us is no more perfectly exemplified than in this story reported by Priests for Life.

"In Milwaukee, Wisconsin one spring evening, a call came into the police station that children were throwing stones from a bridge.  When the police arrived and asked the children what was in the containers they were throwing around, the children responded, "little people." In those containers were the bodies of 6 to 8-weekold aborted babies that the children had found in a trash dumpster behind the Mill Medical Center."

"Little people."  Out of the mouths of babes.  But these babes are like something out of "Children of the Damned".  What has happened in our country that little kids can look at tiny dead children, recognize them as "little people" and feel nothing, can play with them like toys?  Are we rearing little Nazi Brownshirts.  Hitler's state babies, as indifferent to the sacredness of life as Dr. Mengele?

When enough of us weep and wretch in horror and revulsion, when we have supped full of horrors, will we then find the courage to say "No more!"  Will we once again assert our humanity as children of a loving God and demand our right to live as moral persons in a society made gentle by Christian charity?  Or are we destined to be Children of the Damned. ESR

Alisa Craddock is a columnist and activist in the culture war, a convert to Catholicism, and describes herself as a Christian Libertarian.  She may be contacted at alisa.craddock at hushmail.com.


 

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